Alive (4 page)

A
wave of warm air caresses us.

Outside our open door is a hallway. The walls are white and smooth, but scratched and cracked in places. The ceiling seems to be made from some kind of pale, rough crystal that glows brightly. Like the coffin room, the floor is a field of soft gray.

Bello and Aramovsky hold each other, her head barely reaching his shoulder. Spingate takes a step behind O’Malley, who is watching me, waiting for me to act. Yong lurks in the background, still pretending to be bored as far as I know.

Someone has to go first.

I take a deep breath. I’m the leader, right? That means I have to lead. I pull the tool free.

When I step into the hallway, I am surprised that Yong steps out with me.

That smirk again. “Can’t let you have all the glory, can I?”

He pretended to be bored with us, but couldn’t let me be the first one out. Yong is strange. Or maybe he’s normal. I have no way of knowing.

The hall runs to the left and right, straight and true as far as I can see in either direction. And on both sides, more to the right than the left, bumpy things, all across the floor, just as coated in dust as the floor itself.

Those things are…

I think of Brewer, shriveled-up little Brewer.

Those things are…

I squeeze my eyes shut. My brain doesn’t seem to work. My thoughts feel clogged, my head feels…
muddy
is the word that seems right. I can’t put the pieces together. I don’t
want
to put them together.

As a group, the others step out around me. No one says a word.

Yong turns right, walks to the first pile of bumpy things. He reaches down and picks something up. Dust tumbles from it, tiny waterfalls of curling motes that hang in the air.

He’s holding a bone.

Long, white, with bits of dark material clinging to it—scraps of dried
meat
. It looks like he is holding a nightmarish club.

“It’s a femur,” Spingate says, her words a shocked sigh. “A human femur.”

Yong drops it. He looks down, slowly turns in place. He is surrounded by skeletons, by bones—piles and piles of them.

This hallway is full of dead people.

Hands on my arm: Bello, clinging to me.

“Em, this isn’t right,” she says. “Let’s leave this place.”

A great idea, if only I knew where to go.

Yong reaches for a round bump near his feet. His hands brush away the gray, then come up holding a human skull covered in tightly dried skin. There is no jawbone. Two empty eye sockets stare out.

He looks at it, adjusts it in his hands. As he does, the stiff flesh along the jaw cracks and crumbles, becomes a puff of descending dust.

And then I understand. The dust…it’s
skin
. Skin and muscle, eyes and brains and guts that have become nothing more than floating powder. Powder that was in my mouth, down my throat, powder that is all around me, coating everything.

What I thought was a sea of dust is an ocean of death.

Yong drops the skull, then runs back to us, to the safety of the group.

Bello cries silently. O’Malley puts his arm around her.

Everyone is looking at me again, waiting for me to tell them what to do. Even Yong. But I don’t know what to do. Who would? I have to think, have to figure out what makes sense.

The hallway really seems to go on forever in both directions. All along it are more archway doors that look like the one we just walked out of. Some of these doors are slightly open; dark spaces with who knows what inside. Others are still sealed shut, the stone gouged and chipped.

Now that I’ve seen the bones, I can’t un-see them. Up and down the hall, lumps in the dust.

Bones are
everywhere
.

Some are full skeletons. Some bones lie by themselves: cracked, broken, splintered. A few of them are blackened, charred—they were
burned
.

Bello’s silent cry shifts to a quiet sob. Something about her tears suggests weakness (
crying doesn’t fix anything
), makes me want to scream at her to
shut up,
to
stop it already.
But I know she can’t help it.

“Where are we?” she says through the tears. “What happened here?”

O’Malley still has his arm around her. If I was the one crying, would he put his arm around me?

He lets go of Bello and walks a few steps to Aramovsky, whispers something in the taller boy’s ear. Aramovsky moves to Bello. He puts his arm around her, pulls her in close. Bello rests her head against his white-shirted shoulder.

O’Malley walks to the skull. He picks it up, brushes off what little dust remains. A few crispy flakes of skin crumble away. He turns it in his hands, holds it toward us so we can see the top.

There is a jagged, roughly triangular hole in the curved white bone.

“Someone killed this person,” he says. “Hit him, or her, with something heavy. Maybe there was a battle.” He squints at it, then at us, at our heads, as if he is comparing the size. “I think these people were grownups. Grownups who slaughtered each other.”

How many dead people lie in this hallway? Maybe a hundred? It’s hard to tell with the parts scattered all over.

One of the dusty skeletons has something sticking out of it. Is that a handle? I walk to what was once a person, grab the handle and pull it free.

I stare at a flat, pointed piece of metal: I’m holding a knife.

If I put the bottom of the metal handle in the crook of my elbow, the knifepoint would reach to the tip of my middle finger. Where the blade joins the handle, two pieces of thin, strong metal stick out the sides. They are etched with tiny carvings of stepped pyramids and suns. At the very end of the handle, below where my hand holds the grip, is a flat, round disc ringed by tiny red gemstones, with another circle of the same stones inside it.

The circle-in-a-circle symbol: exactly like the one on Aramovsky’s forehead.

I’m holding the tool in one hand, the knife in the other.

Bello’s nose wrinkles. “Em, is that a sword?”

“Swords are bigger,” Yong says. “I think. No, they’re bigger.”

“Leave it here,” Bello says. “That’s for
them
. That’s for the grownups. We don’t need it.”

I want to drop it. Not because of her words, but because the knife frightens me. I don’t even want it touching my skin. This knife was used to kill. It was used to turn people—people like us—into nothing but piles of bones and puffs of dust.

The grownups killed each other. If any of them are still alive, will they try to kill us, too?

“We might have to defend ourselves,” I say to Bello. “We need it.”

She shakes her head. “We don’t need it. It’s a bad thing, please don’t bring it.”

Yong comes closer to me. His eyes are suddenly alive, burning with eagerness. He holds out his hand.

“Give the knife to me,” he says. “I’ll take it. You carry the tool.”

There is a hunger to his words, something…
disturbing
about his need. Just like I know it’s a bad idea if he leads, I know he shouldn’t have the knife.

“I’ll hold on to it for now,” I say.

He is standing in front of me, his back to the others. They can’t see his face, but I can. His upper lip twitches, twists into a sneer. His eagerness shifts, transforms. His heavy black hair hangs down almost over his eyes, eyes that blaze with hate.

“You’ll change your mind,” he says quietly. Then, in the faintest whisper: “Or I’ll change it for you.”

Before I can respond, he smiles, turns and walks back to the others, leaving me alone with the skeleton.

I briefly wonder if I should tell everyone what he said, but I decide against it. We don’t need another argument right now. We need to follow Bello’s advice and get away from this place.

I look at the doors lining the hallway. Gouged, chipped, scratched. Were people desperate to get inside?

I see one set of doors that is slightly open. If we had come out of our room and turned left instead of right, this archway would have been a few feet down on the right-hand side. The space between the stone doors is barely wide enough for me to slide through if I turn sideways. Coming from inside that room, I see a dim, flickering light.

Does that room have more coffins? I walk toward it, past Bello and the others.

A strong hand lands on my shoulder.

It’s O’Malley.

“Em, don’t go in there,” he says.

He sees me looking at his hand, then pulls it away. His face flushes. He didn’t act like that when he put his arm around Bello.

“I have to,” I say. “There could be more of us inside.”

O’Malley closes his blue eyes for a second, swallows, nods once, opens them.

“Then I’m going in with you.”

Those words make my heart hammer so loud I wonder if he hears it.

I’m holding the knife and the tool. I thought the tool was a weapon at first—it’s not, but it will still work fine for that purpose.

I hold it out to O’Malley. “Take it,” I say. “In case there’s danger.”

Spingate gasps; she points at the tool.

“It’s called a
scepter,
” she says. “That word just popped into my head. The tool, that’s what it’s called.”

Scepter, tool, weapon…all I care about right now is that it is heavy and O’Malley can use it to smash things.

He takes it.

“I’m with you, Em,” he says.

His eyes…so blue…

I can’t look at him any longer, so I face the door. I walk to it and slide my body through the narrow opening.

O’Malley follows.

T
he room is dim, illuminated by a single flickering light high up in the arched ceiling.

I point the knife out in front of me. O’Malley holds the bottom of the scepter with both hands, the prongs up near his ear.

Like our room, there are twelve dusty coffins arranged in two end-to-end rows of six. All the coffins are open. The lid-halves aren’t folded neatly to the sides—they stick up at different angles, broken; did the occupants fight their way out like I did?

I walk up to the first coffin. O’Malley is right next to me. I brush off the nameplate before looking inside.

Orange stones surround the name
L. Morgan.

Inside the coffin, dust-covered clothes—a little white shirt, a short red tie, little black pants—covering a tiny, withered corpse.

A corpse far smaller than Brewer.

A corpse so small I could cradle it in both arms.

The skull, the
tiny
skull, is smashed to bits at the center of the forehead. I can’t tell what symbol is in that dried, cracked skin, if there was any symbol at all.

O’Malley’s shaking hand slowly reaches toward L. Morgan’s head. His fingertip gently touches the ridge of bone below the little skull’s right eye.

“A child,” O’Malley says. “Barely more than a baby. How could anyone do this?”

A baby
. Even if L. Morgan had been awake when the attack came, he couldn’t have defended himself. The grownup bodies in the hallway…maybe those people died in a battle, but that’s not what happened here.

O’Malley walks to another coffin. One lid-half remains closed, the other has been torn away, tossed to the floor long ago to become a landing place for dust.

“Same thing here, Em,” he says. His voice is ragged, more breath than words. “They ripped the lid off, then they caved in this little girl’s face.”

I see a pile of bumps in the dusty aisle between the coffin rows. Then another, and another. It wasn’t just children that died in here.

There are ten more coffins in this room. They are all open. I don’t have to look inside them to know what lies within.

All these little kids, slaughtered where they lay…I can’t bear this for one second more. I have to get out of here.

“O’Malley, come on.”

“But don’t you want to—”

“Come on!”

I hurry back to the stone doors. I squeeze through the crack and into the hallway. Spingate, Bello, Yong and Aramovsky are waiting, their eyes wide, their faces carrying an expression I now recognize—the look of someone desperately hoping for good news.

“Well?” Spingate says. “Are there more of us?”

“They were…younger,” I say. “And they’re all dead.”

“Younger,” Spingate says. “Like Brewer?”

I shake my head. I hold my free hand at my hip, palm parallel to the floor, showing them how tall L. Morgan would have been.

Everyone looks down, as if they expect a child to suddenly appear at my side, my hand on his head.

They are shocked. Even Yong. Despair pulls at his features, makes me forget his constant smirk.

Behind me, O’Malley slides out of the narrow opening. His chest barely fits through the gap; the stone door’s edges rip off another button, drag a long, white scratch across his smooth skin.

Bello stares at him hopefully, like she wants him to tell a story different from mine.

“Is it true?” she asks. “Little kids?”

O’Malley nods. “Little kids. Dressed like us. They were murdered.”

Murdered
.

The word enrages me. We could have died the same way, murdered while we slept. I want to know who bashed in those tiny skulls. I want to find the people who did it, and I want to make them pay.

“It was the Grownups,” I say. I hear the hate in my voice. “It had to be. They want to kill us”—I spread out my arms, gesturing to the bones in the hall—“just like they killed each other.”

I don’t want to look in any of the other rooms. We need to get away from all this death. I stare up the right side of the hall, then the left.

To the left is our coffin room, and where we found the knife.

The right seems to have fewer bones, so that’s where we’ll go.

“This way,” I say, and I start walking.

O’Malley falls in on my right side. The other four follow.

We leave the skeletons behind.